How To Ace Your B2B Marketing Using Social Media

B2B companies might think of social media as a nice-to-have aspect of their digital marketing: it’s not essential, but it could help, like a sidekick to emails, blogs and website optimization. But a lot of superheroes needed sidekicks to fully get the job done. Batman and Robin, Captain America and Bucky, Green Arrow and Speedy, and that’s just naming a few. Where would those heroes be without their trusty and effective right-hand man?  

That’s how social media marketing is to your broader digital marketing efforts. Like Kid Flash helps Barry Allen fight Professor Zoom, strategic social posts can help bolster your existing content, reaching more people and shining a spotlight on your work.  

So, while it might not seem like the main act, social media marketing for your business does matter — and it shouldn’t be optional. We’ll show you ways to maximize your marketing using social media to strategically reach your B2B audience. 

Building an Efficient B2B Social Media Strategy

McKinsey & Company found that B2B customers use an average of 10 interaction channels throughout their buying journey, and almost all want a true omnichannel experience where they can interact and buy while seamlessly switching across multiple channels. Additionally, it discovered that two out of three B2B customers opt for remote human interactions or digital self-service, and they’re willing to spend $500,000 or more if they have a positive online experience. 

With that in mind, social media is becoming increasingly critical for the B2B customer path. However, this type of marketing differs from B2C marketing: 

• B2B social media marketing: Targets decision-makers within companies, providing content that’s typically more educational, in-depth and data-driven. Think white papers, webinars and case studies. Additionally, the sales cycles are longer and involve more touchpoints, making social media a beneficial tool.
• B2C social media marketing: Targets individual customers making personal purchases. B2C content marketing is typically more visual, entertaining and promotional, including videos, influencers and lifestyle content. 

When trying to get buy-in from a company’s decision maker, you must provide value at every stage of the buyer’s journey, from start to finish. This takes a thought-through B2B social media strategy, which you can build with these steps:

Identify Your Business Goals

Many businesses use social media as a top-of-the-funnel marketing approach. This isn’t bad, but you could be doing so much more. Whether you’re promoting a new product, highlighting a new case study or improving your B2B brand awareness, your social media should align with your goals. Once you identify those main goals, determine how a social channel can fill in the gaps and amplify your message. 

Understand Your Target Audience and Their Social Behaviors

Social media feels more personal than many other digital marketing approaches. That being said, you want the stakeholders you’re trying to reach to feel like you know them and understand their needs. Research to learn which social media platform your target audience spends the most time on, what types of B2B content they consume and what problems they’re trying to solve. This will help you post content that’s customized and relevant to potential customers. 

Align Every Social Media Effort With Your Marketing Objectives

Driving real impact requires a holistic view of your marketing. While traditional and digital methods each have their own purposes, all should be working together to serve the greater good: reaching your audience with relevant and engaging content that converts. Here’s how to ensure your social media marketing work stays focused and effective:

Pick the Right Platforms

Not all social media platforms are used the same way — in fact, each has its own superpower. LinkedIn, for example, is great when posting thought leadership and lead generation, while X (formerly Twitter) is most beneficial for real-time engagement and industry news. Instagram, on the other hand, allows you to post photos and videos of visually appealing content, like how-tos, infographics and behind-the-scenes images. 

The best social media platforms will cater to your company’s strengths and match your audience’s behavior.

Choose Topic Pillars and Create Content Within Those Pillars

Want to know Brafton’s secret weapon for a picture-perfect B2B strategy? Topic pillars. Define three to five core themes — your topic pillars — that reflect your brand’s expertise and align with your audience’s interests. These could be product education, customer success stories, industry trends or thought leadership. Then, focus your content creation and posting schedule around these pillars, staying in your lane and showing off your company’s prowess. Not only does this attract relevant customers, but it’s great for SEO, as Google and other search engines reward topical authority.

Determine the Right Publishing Schedule and Cadence

Posting consistently is more important than posting constantly. Identify the best times and days to publish based on audience engagement data. Also, create a sustainable cadence — whether that’s three times a week or daily — without sacrificing quality on each social media channel.

Conduct Community Management: How Much Is Enough?

Engagement is a two-way street — and it takes time and energy. While there’s no perfect formula for community management, proactively prioritizing social media engagement will boost your B2B marketing. Responding to comments, answering questions and acknowledging feedback builds trust and shows your audience you’re listening. 

In fact, a Sprout Social study revealed that 51% of consumers think the most memorable action you can take on social media is simply responding. Set internal benchmarks for social media management, and invest in tools or team members if needed to manage this at scale. 

How Do B2B Social Media Marketing Metrics Work?

With advances in data analytics tools and visibility, your ability to pinpoint social media ROI has never been more accurate — or more important. But what metrics should you actually pay attention to? And how can you use these KPIs to better engage with your B2B audience? Ultimately, you want to focus on results that matter, not just to marketing, but to sales and customer service:

Return on Investment (ROI)

ROI is a way to measure how profitable a social media post is. It tells you how much money you made (or lost) compared to how much you spent. When tracked consistently, ROI connects your social content directly to business growth. 

Cost per Result (CPR)

This metric measures the cost of achieving a specific outcome in a social media campaign. To get this total, divide the total ad spend by the number of desired results, such as clicks, conversions or impressions. With CPR, the lower the number, the better the performance. 

Engagement Rate

Like the name suggests, this shows how actively people interact with your social media posts, whether that be likes, shares, comments or clicks. In B2B, social media engagement can indicate relevance, authority and trust in your brand. A high rate often means your content is reaching the right brands. 

Click-Through Conversions (CTC)

Click-through conversions happen when a user clicks on an ad or a link, lands on a website or landing page and then completes a desired action — like making a purchase, signing up or filling out a form — during the same visit. It’s one of the most direct and measurable types of conversions, showing you which B2B social media content works.

Impressions and Reach

Your impressions count shows how many times the algorithm displays a social media post to someone, a good indicator of how popular a piece of content is. Reach, on the other hand, is the potential unique viewers a post has. While a post might get in front of a B2B organization leader three times, that counts as three impressions and one reach. 

But these metrics don’t just provide you with insight into how your content is doing; they also show you what to do next. Data for the sake of data doesn’t do you any good if you don’t use it to learn more about what your customers want to see from you next. 

For instance, if you notice that engagement rates are high on video posts but low on static images, that’s a clear signal to shift more of your content strategy toward video — giving your audience more of what they already connect with. Similarly, if whitepapers or case studies are driving strong CTC, that indicates your audience values in-depth, solution-focused content — and you can prioritize creating more resources that highlight your expertise and address specific industry pain points.

Organic or Paid: What’s Better for Your Brand?

When it comes to social media, you have many options. One main choice is determining when and how you’ll use organic and paid social media content. Both have power, but different goals and approaches. 

For long-term growth and reward, organic posts will serve you well. Follow these hacks for B2B social media content that packs a punch:

• Posting consistently and engaging with audience members authentically.
• Leveraging employee advocacy and intentional thought leadership.
• Utilizing relevant influencer marketing within your specific industry.
• Optimizing content with relevant hashtags and keywords within your content pillars. 

Yes, organic reach is critical, but that’s not to say paid social media isn’t. Here’s when to invest in paid social:

• When organic reach has dried up and you need a boost.
• When you need to generate leads quickly, either for a special promotion, a new product release or another short-term goal.
• When you want to target specific B2B buyers based on their job title, industry, company size or other factors. 

Whether you pursue organic content, paid campaigns or both, using social media to enhance your B2B marketing can help rescue any content, giving it the spotlight and reaching relevant business decision-makers. 

By having a killer B2B social media marketing strategy and measuring the right metrics, you’ll be unstoppable against your competitors. So suit up, strategize and let your content and social media campaigns fight side by side. 

Just remember, with great power comes great responsibility.